G wie Gespür

In theory: AI will soon be able to do it all: summarise interviews, detect patterns, cluster statements, write reports and suggest recommendations. In user research, that sounds tempting: less transcription, less analysis, less effort. No more tedious listening, no more scrolling through notes, no more wrestling with the question of whether a quote is just an edge case or a real signal.

In reality: good user research starts long before a single sentence is transcribed. It starts with watching. With the tiny pause before a click. With the puzzled look that wanders across the screen. With the laugh that covers up insecurity. With the sentence “That makes sense”, while the hand confidently moves to the wrong place.

AI can describe these moments if we feed them to it. But it does not experience them. It isn’t in the room. It doesn’t sense when a participant is being polite instead of honest. It doesn’t notice when a product is technically correct and still completely off on a human level. And it certainly doesn’t continuously translate: from behaviour into meaning, from meaning into hypotheses, from hypotheses into better questions.

Experienced researchers don’t just hear what’s being said. They hear what’s missing. They notice when a customer mislabels the problem. They know when to probe, when to stay quiet, and when to defend an uncomfortable observation against a beloved internal belief.

That’s Gespür: a mix of observation, experience, intelligence and presence. AI can sort, compress and relieve some of the workload. That’s a lot. But it can’t understand on our behalf. Real insight doesn’t happen in the prompt, but in the moment someone realises: Now I finally understand what this is really about.